


What a Fisherman Knows

by orphan_account



Category: Chrono Cross
Genre: Grief, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 12:34:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11486490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "You don’t pull a fish out of the water and make him breathe air."A quiet scene between Macha and Serge after he opts not to save Kid.





	What a Fisherman Knows

It takes all of ten seconds for the boy he’s barely known for half a day to start judging him. The second those ill-prepared words slip out of his mouth -- “I don’t know,” he says dumbly -- he already starts to feel the fish swimming in the bottom of his stomach. He begins to feel weak in the knees, not unlike he did the first time he almost told Leena how he felt about her. This time it’s a different, more powerful feeling: he’s never felt the potentiality of being responsible for someone’s death before. It’s an oddly grounding feeling, as if he is an adult for the first time in his life.

And Korcha takes Kid’s necklace right out of his hands and storms out. _Why,_ Serge finds himself wanting to say, _did you make it seem so impossible, then?_ But he knows the answer; when you care about someone, you should be willing to do the impossible for them, and you shouldn’t have even a moment of hesitation.

Curiously, after he has that thought, Serge feels like a net that’s been emptied of fish. It’s as if he can’t think about much of anything anymore.

Later in the day, he sits by the window at Doc’s, kicking the dusty floor with his boots. More than anything he listens to the breath catching raggedly in Kid’s lungs, observes the way the light spills out across the floor and across her pillow and catches in her tangled blond hair. It makes the sweat on her forehead glisten.

He finds himself looking at her face even though he is trying not to. The swell and murmur of the sea outside isn’t comforting enough; he can hear the wind racing and the beating of gulls’ wings, but he sits in his chair like an anchor, the minutes dripping into hours.

“Aren’t you deep in thought?”

The voice is full of that rich, musical Guldove accent, and he knows it’s Macha before he even looks up and sees her. He smiles when she pulls up a chair and sits down, but he can’t seem to make his eyes smile too. “Hello, Macha,” he says flatly, his mouth dry as a canyon.

“Thought I’d come and see how she’s doin’,” Macha says. She looks now at Kid, now at Serge, now at the ramshackle room around them, her eyes glinting. Mostly she keeps looking at Serge, gaze flickering tactfully away whenever he catches her eye. Though her expression seems at first neutral, her mouth tilts downward and her brow furrows; her face is full of little wrinkles. “Where’s Doc?”

“Not sure. I saw him at the bar earlier.”

Serge is dizzied. He’s holding the vivid images at the edge of his mind at bay: they’re all of poison-edged hooks, cats’ sly faces and cautious gaits. Of long, long falls, of the impact of water and then the blink of an eye and then scraping himself up off the salt-smelling wooden walkways of Guldove. Of Kid -- always so damned bold! -- holding her knife to the general’s daughter’s neck like it was a routine she’d done since she began to walk, and then the exact expression on her face when she crumpled to the ground.

And then deeper than that -- the old nightmare creeps into his mind at last, as if to say, I told you so. He knew even then that he would be responsible for something like this, even though the idea of Kid’s blood on his hands was unimaginable.

“You don’t talk much, do you, Serge?” Macha leans forward with a heavy creak of her chair. “I told you not to pay any mind to Korcha. He’d have done the same if he were in your place. No matter what, I’m tryin’ to say, it’s not your fault--”

“Well, I don’t know whose fault it is, then,” he snaps, feeling like his eyes are full of salt water. Embarrassing! He’s like a kid again, a kid with a sprained ankle crying for his mother. He can’t speak, because he knows that if he does, he’ll start crying. He remembers in keen detail the time that he broke his ankle stumbling prematurely from a boat, and how Leena let him limp back to his house with one arm draped across her shoulder, laughing at his tears and moans of agony. He doesn’t want to cry -- he wants to be strong, like his father doubtless was.

Macha sighs. She scoots her chair closer to his, just a bit -- just enough so that she can reach out and touch his arm with her hand.

For the first time since he got swept away to this bizarre other world, he cries, and it isn’t just a few solitary tears; he buries his head in his hands and is racked by it, trembling from head to foot. He feels Macha rise, hovering over him and wrapping her arms around him. He can hear her heartbeat and her breathing and it’s familiar in the most awful way: for once he has to stop and think about all the things that he misses from the Arni Village of his home, and his mother is at the center of all of them, the vacancy around which all of these fearful strangenesses orbit.

“I want to go home,” he says through his tears, finally giving voice to the thing that he’s been pushing back down into the bottom of his heart for the last few weeks. “She’s dying, and all I could say was, ‘I don’t know.’”

“Hush,” says Macha, holding him for a few moments more in silence.

He was born knowing the grip of an oar in his hand, the shake of a boat, the way the sea moves; he knows fish and sandy shores, bait and nets, the season for everything. He doesn’t know how to decide whether saving someone’s life is worth a wildly dangerous endeavor, or how to march on a fortress, or how to tell someone that he loves her for what might be the last time.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” he tells Macha, wrapping his arms around her tightly. “I’m alone. There’s a stranger in my home and everyone thinks I’m dead. I can’t save her -- I’ve never been able to do anything like this.”

“I’ll tell you what it is you’re feelin’,” Macha says, pulling back from the hug and holding Serge’s shoulders and staring into his eyes with the firmest, kindest look he has ever seen in his life (barring, perhaps, one other). “My husband died when I was young. There was nothin’ I could do, but I felt all that weight on me, just like you do. I know my place here -- I cook, I clean, I’m a mother, and I’m never questionin’ anything, and then one day my whole world’s gone, just like that. And it’s just me and Korcha, and nothin’ makes sense anymore. Nothin’.”

Serge nods, swabbing the tears away from his eyes with his thick gloves.

“But you don’t stop bein’ who you are just because your world changes, becomes a little strange, makes you wonder what you were really supposed to do all along. And believe me, Serge, you don’t get strong all at once. You don’t pull a fish out of the water and make him breathe air. A young man like you doesn’t know what to do the first time somethin’ like this happens, like magic.” Macha snaps her fingers. “That’s why we’ve got each other. I take in kids because when I needed takin’ in, when I was alone and tryin’ to raise my Korcha, Guldove took me in.”

“But if she dies...”

“You’ve got me.” She embraces him even more tightly than before. “I’m not leavin’. I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

He allows himself to let go, for just a scattering of seconds, of the image of Kid that’s been emblazoned across the landscape of his mind since he met her. Nothing is all right, but he calms himself, listening to the sea and the shouting of one fisherman to the other on the docks.


End file.
